Category: NexJ

For the last week I’ve been trying to fix some Xcode build problems that we’ve been having. After I upgraded the project to 2.3 Carl tried to run it on the simulator and it didn’t work. After doing a lot of digging I figured out that I only provided an armv7 static library of Cordova. What this meant was that we couldn’t run it on the simulator because it runs on the Mac which uses an x86 processor. What I ended up having to do was add two versions of the library to the project, one compiled for x86, and one compiled for armv7, and then make the project conditionally link them in based on if we were building for x86 or armv7. This was kind of tricky because I didn’t know at first how Xcode manages this stuff. I finally discovered that you can add a build condition underneath other linker flags in the target’s properties that will allow you to do this.

After this was all done I had to take care of adding in the 2.3 version of the AppDelegate and ViewController because these weren’t in the project when I switched over to 2.3. They had been taken out, by me I believe, I forget why. Once that was done I began to get some problems with the linker not being able to resolve some of the symbols in the Cordova library that had to do with extending classes. Fixing this required me to add “-force_load” to the linker flags. This specified to Xcode to load the entire library, whereas if you don’t put that, its default mode is to not load extensions… strange.

There’s still one last problem with the build that Carl has informed me of. The problem isn’t currently surfacing on my own machine so we’re going to have to do some more digging.

Final, thing that I did was attempt to simplify the Command hierarchy by making ReturnableCommand just a Returnable and then having BluetoothCommand implement the Command protocol. This simplifies it a little because ReturnableCommand no longer has to be an abstract class. It also makes sense because an object that is returnable to the Cordova library isn’t necessarily a command. This way in the future it will be possibly to have many different types of objects be able to return a plugin result back to Cordova.

We’ve gotten quite a lot of work done this week in the Connected Wellness project. However, we’re getting close to a point where we might not be able to do any work until we get Apple Developer licenses. Most of the preliminary development has been done and we now need to start testing cod; to do that we need those licenses! I heard from Carl that it’s being worked on and we should have them soon, so I’m hopeful.

Other than that we had a big review on Catilin’s packet parser implementation. I probably spent a few hours just reviewing that alone. I also went around cleaning up a few of the issues such as removing commands that we aren’t able to implement yet due to not being able to fully control Bluetooth on Apple Devices and implementing the last few commands.

The biggest thing that I’ve done this week is to include the Cordova library into the mercurial repo and get it set up so that it is incorporated into the Xcode project out of the box. This way we don’t have to set it up manually every time we clone a fresh repo (that was getting tiring). It took a little bit of figuring out how to do this, but what ended up working was to include the library file along with the header files of the library (Apple requires header files for statically linked libraries to be somewhere in the project). After I did this I needed to add the folder that holds the library and header files to the required frameworks list of the project, modify the header search paths to include the directory where the library’s headers are, and set the linker up to link with the library by giving it the path to the .a file. All these options can be found in the “build settings” tab of the build target in Xcode i.e. the project file.

After I got the library incorporated into the repo I went about moving our current code to support Cordova 2.3 (we were on 2.0 before). This proved to be very easy. The only things that changed were the include paths of the Cordova headers when #import-ing them, the function signature of the method that Cordova calls in the plugin, and the way that Plugin Results are passed back to Cordova. It was actually easier moving to 2.3 than it was to code 2.0 because they’ve made it a lot more easier and intuitive to work with.

After that pull request lands there’s only going to be one last thing to code – the stopListeningCommand. That will probably not be hard. I’m hoping that we will be able to get those Apple Developer licenses early next week so we can continue powering through this. It is due by the end of February…

So it’s been another eventful week for the Connected Wellness iOS team at CDOT. We’ve made a lot of progress towards having the project completed, but there are still some major outstanding issues that we need to tackle. The PacketParser has yet to be completed (one of the most complex portions of the plugin), we’ve still yet to hear back from A&D about low energy BT devices, which we need in order to use the CoreBluetooth framework provided by Apple, and we’re still running into some problems regarding the amount of control that the CoreBT framework gives us. The CoreBT framework does not expose a way to start, stop, or enable Bluetooth in the device. These are all things that the Android plugin is able to do. Although it is not completely necessary to implement these (the user can start it manually) it would be nice to provide it to the user as a convenience.

Threads

To continue my discussion from last week in regards to the Invoker and dispatching Commands asynchronously on threads – it has been ridiculously easy to implement this. Instead of going through and creating our own WorkQueue and thread management classes I’ve implemented NSOperationQueue and NSInvocationOperation inside of the Invoker class. NSOperationQueue is provided by Apple and has all the functions to properly manage thread execution on a work queue and NSInvocationOperation allows us to specify the target and selector that the threads started from the work queue will invoke. Check out how easy it was to do here.

Cordova Lib

During this last week we ran into a big problem of everyone checking code into the repo that wasn’t compiling or causing problems. Yesterday I went through and fixed all the compilation problems. We’re planning to have a more strict review process in the future. One of the major problems that I encountered was the Cordova Lib not being properly compiled and linked to the project. This was caused because for some reason Cordova 2.0 doesn’t support armv6, so I had to remove that from the Cordova project as well as the iOS port project. The other big issue is that currently the Cordova library is not included in the repository. This means that when a fresh copy is cloned you have to go through the process of manually downloading PhoneGap and incorporating it into the project. So in the next day or so I’m going to set up the repo to include the compiled archive and point the project to it by default.

Java to iOS

The other major problem that I ran into this week was specific to the port from Java to iOS. In the Java version the concrete commands reside as inner classes in the DevicePlugin class. Due to this they all have access to the BluetoothServer stored within the DevicePlugin class. Moving over to iOS we cannot use inner classes and so the commands need to be provided with access to the server in some other way. To compensate this I’ve introduced a new command, BluetoothCommand, which sits between the concrete commands and the ReturnableCommand. BluetoothCommand exposes the base plugin in the ReturnableCommand as a MedicalDevicePlugin as well as exposing a property on it to access the BluetoothServer on the MedicalDevicePlugin. You can check out that here. Now that I’m thinking about it a BluetoothCommand doesn’t necessarily need to work with a MedicalDevicePlugin… what we’d need to do then in order to abstract it more is to create a base class like BluetoothPlugin that will expose a BluetoothServer property. I don’t really know if we should do this though as I’ve read a lot recently about the dangers of over designing code. I’ll post back next week about what comes from this.

Next Week

By the end of next week I’m hoping that we have most of the pieces in place to start testing. The PacketParser will be done and the few other commands that are left to be implemented will be done. Personally I will be working on some of the outstanding commands such as the listen and isSupported() commands.

We’ve gotten a lot done in the last week for the iOS port of the Bluetooth Plugin. You can check out my work here.

I’ve finished the MedicalDevicePlugin class.

Wrote the Command Protocol.

Wrote a template for the ReturnableCommand class.

I started on the WorkQueue class, but Carl told me to shift from that to the Invoker class because WorkQueue will be removed sometime in the near future.

I also wrote the Invoker class but left out the bulk of the implementation as it uses the WorkQueue, so there is no point to code it for now as I don’t know what kind of design we will be using.

I’ve also pushed a lot of bug fixes to the repo.

Objective-c vs. Java

There were a lot of changes going to iOS from Android. The biggest one was that a lot of the architecture and functions of the Cordova Library in iOS are different than in Android. They still follow the same idea, but are different in implementation. Most of the functions in Android have an iOS equivalent. One of the ones that do not is onActivityResult() in the DevicePlugin implementation. I’ve talked with Carl about this though and it seems that it won’t be that big of a deal since we are planning to remove that function in the future. It seems to me that the Cordova Library for Objective-c is a lot more immature then the Java one. You can see this in the fact that going from version 2.0 (the one that we are using) to 2.3, most of the Objective-c code changes, but almost nothing from the Java code does. This indicates that there is still a lot of work to be done on the Objective-c library. I’m not complaining, but the Java Cordova Library just looks so much nicer.

Another thing that is a lot different are language specific things. For example in Objective-c you cannot specify the visibility level (i.e. public, protected, private) on member functions, and you can’t specify static member variables in exactly the same way as Java. This isn’t a big deal, but it is one of the many things that must change from going to Java to iOS. Another, rather concerning, thing that is different is that Objective-c offers no way to synchronize entire functions. This is a problem because this design paradigm is used a lot in the Java plugin. We will have to find a way around it in Objective-c.

Other Work

Caitlin has currently been tackling the BluetoothServer class as well as doing the full implementation of the ReturnableCommand class.

Vince has been working on the PacketParser implementation. I haven’t heard much from him this week, but I hope he has been making good progress.

Moving Forward

After Caitlin gets the ReturnableCommand landed we will be able to start implementing the concrete Command objects that inherit from ReturnableCommand and begin to tie the commands into the Invoker as well as the MedicalDevicePlugin class. I’ve taken on writing the isSupported(), isEnabled(), and isDisabled() commands. Everything is looking good so far baring the problem we may have with the Bluetooth Protocols…

Edit:

Recently heard from Carl that I should be implementing threads in Objective-c in the Invoker class. It’s up to me how we get that done. So I will be working on that before continuing the Command implementations.

So I’ve started a new job here at CDOT (Seneca’s Centre for Development of Open Technology) and the first project that I’ve been assigned to work on is a project called Connected Wellness that is being done in collaboration with NexJ and other colleges. I’m on a team of three who will be porting the current android Bluetooth plugin over to iOS. I will be blogging a lot about this in the next two months since the deadline for it to be done is the end of February.

What I’ve been doing so far is setting up my development environment and getting acquainted with Mercurial which I have never used before. I’ve started work on the MedicalDevicePlugin class which will be the entry point for Apache Cordova to the plugin. I’ve also ported over the basic outline for the Command interface and inheritance structure in order for me to be able to reference them in the MedicalDevicePlugin class. Everything for my part looks like smooth sailing so far. The only thing I’m worried about is getting the Cordova library to work properly in iOS.

My teammate, Caitlin, has recently blogged about troubles with the current libraries we are using for the Bluetooth protocol not supporting the specific devices we want to interface with. Hopefully, we will be able to work around this. My first thought is to use an open source Bluetooth library for iOS, that is if Apple even lets outside frameworks access the Bluetooth hardware directly in some way.